"The open source model, as Red Hat has proven, can be extremely profitable," says Kevin Harvey, a general partner at Benchmark Capital, and MySQL's chairman. "It's not a story of profits at first; it's a story of profits you'll generate as you grow." MySQL would like to see considerably more growth, even before selling stock to the public. It would do that in part by upping the percentage of paying customers.

We've witnessed some mythic events in tech history recently. One eye-popper was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sharing a stage for the first time in 20 years at The Wall Street Journal's D: All Things Digital conference last month. Perhaps even more shocking than that is Microsoft's willingness — reluctant as it may be — to share a stage with the Linux community.

Sirius Corporation and Scalix have announced an alliance to promote the deployment of Open Source groupware solutions in European enterprises. The companies already share Specsavers Opticians Group as a major client, and are looking to use its integration of Open Source technologies as a template for similar enterprises.

Following recent reports of a South African bank eying out Linux, Novell South Africa today issued a statement in which it said it had reached an agreement with First National Bank of South Africa to standardize the bank's 12 000 desktops in its 680 retail branches on Novell's Linux product.

H&R Block's use of open-source technologies is not about saving money, but rather about creating revenue, acquiring and retaining customers, and providing technologies they really care about, said Mark West, the company's CIO, at the annual Open Source Business Conference here on May 22.

For more than a decade, open source software has been mostly the province of programmers. Although the underpinnings of the Internet itself are powered mostly by open source software, it’s been said that most open source projects begin when a coder “scratches an itch.” That is, most open source projects are begun to satisfy personal interests rather than to meet commercial goals.